


Seven & Seven Tower, or: How We Lived After the World Died

by kwritten



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Future, F/F, Gen, Ice Age Scenario, Lesbian Character, What if instead of Snowpiercer trains there were just really big buildings?, anyway - that's what i'm working with, just go with it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-11
Updated: 2021-02-11
Packaged: 2021-03-17 09:28:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29348175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: What if GOT took place in a world that was a single tower in the middle of an ice storm?
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1





	Seven & Seven Tower, or: How We Lived After the World Died

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nereid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nereid/gifts), [clytemnestras](https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/gifts).



> If there is a prompt for this, please let me know? I seem to have lost my goddarnded gourd.
> 
> Was it:::   
> got, sansa/margaery,
> 
> _There were some nice parts, sure,  
>  all lemondrop and mellonball, laughing in silk pajamas  
> and the grains of sugar  
> on the toast, love love or whatever, take a number. I’m sorry  
> it’s such a lousy story._

When she is twelve, they tell her, alliances like this are normal for people like us - she doesn’t ask about her brothers, she knows that there is little in the world more complicated than the very _fact_ of her brothers. Alliances like this are what you were born to do, it is what we raised you for - she doesn’t ask about her sister, she knows there is little in the world more dangerous than her baby sister with her bright eyes and her veins that beat out _vengeance_. You will guide us into a more powerful future - she doesn’t look around them, at their seat among the clouds and ask what is more powerful than the money they have spilt so much blood to keep. You will keep us safe - she doesn’t ask whether they are safe in this moment, nothing in the world she knows is safe…. ever. You will be like a Queen in a fairytale - though all the queens in the stories she loves are monstrous - eating babies and sending woodsmen after their own daughters and finding nourishment for their bodies in the hearts of their enemies - she doesn’t tell them she’d much rather remain a princess, this isn’t her time to speak. 

When she is twelve, they tell her, alliances like this are normal for people like us - and they put her in the waiting arms of a Queen who makes the dangers of the world seem soft as goose-feather-pillows. When she is twelve, she meets her husband and he laughs as though laughing causes harm and she learns, far too soon, that it is true.

Laughter in this court of thorns is more dangerous than anything she’s read about in her fairytales. 

When she is twelve, a Queen takes her as a princess and sits her next to a prince and calls that boy her husband. She is not so very old to know any better, and so she smiles and is grateful. She finds a window and stares out at the grey fog that exists in this part of the Seven Kingdoms, so named for the seven stories of seven that was their foundation a millenia ago. She find a window and peers out into the mist, until her new mother-in-law takes her to a balcony and lets her wander about in the cold air. It is not quite strong enough, not quite as dangerous. There are no cracks in the foundation here, no whistling wind to be heard at all hours of the night, no layers of frost on the floors of the hallways in the morning. She looks up and sees only grey and misses the blackness of her home.

When she is thirteen, they kill her father. The prince who is her husband, takes an ancient sword and his mother the queen smiles broadly and she sees that it was always true - laughter can be a curse and a weapon all in one. What rips out her heart, what she will remember, is not the warm sensation of her father’s blood splattering across her face as she screamed, but the look of amusement on her husband’s face.

When she is seventeen, they bring news that her brother is dead. She does not weep. She has dried up. She has not had her blood in three years and has not cried in two. They tell her that her brother is dead and the Sky belongs to her husband now - she does not blink or weep or gasp. They tell her that the upheaval of a prince dying could have destroyed her people and she is lucky to have already formed such a powerful alliance with the Queen - she does not correct them, she does not raise her chin and say **KING ROBB**. They tell her that she should eat, should sit by the window and look out at the city, that she should be happy her kingdom is safe - she does not tell them to fuck off and finds this concession a triumph on her part. 

She does not tell them that she misses the sky. For however dangerous it was - however harsh and cold and dark and coarse and terrifying it was - it’s safety is what she longs for most. 

When she is eighteen, she watches as her betrothed husband - the cruel prince who shattered her heart daily with a triumphant, joyful smile - becomes betrothed to someone else. When she is old enough to understand, she watches from a balcony, lost in the anonymity of a crowd, as a bright, beautiful woman beams up at the dias where her husband sits, and pledges her allegiance. When she is eighteen, she smiles her first real smile in years, and feels freedom falling upon her shoulders. 

She wonders if they will send her back upstairs. Back to the Sky where she belongs. Another forgotten princess in the clouds. 

When she is nineteen, she is given - as a barren curse - to her husband’s uncle. There is no conversation, there is no discussion. No one takes her by the hand and explains to her what strength is or what an alliance means or how her beauty will mean safety for so many others. Her beauty could not save the people she loved and so - their words would be meaningless, anyhow. 

When she is twenty, she is walked down an aisle in an empty chapel and married to the dwarven brother to an ogre queen and she thinks, _Is this what you meant, mother? When you said that I would one day live in my own fairytale?_ When she is twenty, she is bone-dry as she says her vows to a stranger, and her heart weeps for the punishing, deadly Sky.

***

When she is seven, they tell her to respect her elders and listen to her father. He hurts her, she cries. He comes in the night like a monster and it hurts. When she is so small in body and mind that it does not occur to her to fight back, they tell her, this is love. This is a father’s love. And so she learns, when her bones are still brittle with growing and her cheeks are still full from her mother’s milk, that love is hurt. And she prays each night to the gods who have punished her with a hairy beast of a father and a dead mother, that she will never know love again. When she is seven, she hears stories of the seven, who all were so wealthy they had little rooms that extended beyond the Walls - out into the air beyond. It is just a fairytale and she pays it no mind. There is no room for magic in her world of dust and pain.

She was raised just above King’s Landing, so that when the moon was full and the world was asleep, she could almost hear the celebrations just below her feet. She longed for a world outside of the chrome and metal that encased her like a grave, but there was nowhere to go, but this was the world she was brought into. Once, after she had run away and begun charging others for the love she hoped their bodies would leach off of her body until she was nothing, a man who wished very much for her to fall in love with him took her close enough to a window that she could nearly see out. There was nothing but the raging echoes of wind and rain. Nothing to see, nothing to hope for. 

When she is twelve she hears a rumor of the below. Miles below, they say, the windows open and the world is not sleet and cold. Miles below, they say, everything is warm. She doesn’t ask - then why do you stay. She knows. It’s why she stays. The heartbreak of finding only more of the same - more of the dark corridors and low ceilings and coughing, miserable people, and heat lamps that flicker - would kill her. She was sure of nothing else. 

When she is nineteen she is told, you have no heart you bitch. And it is the third time that year that a married, middle-aged, pot-bellied man with stink in his beard and a soft cock has said these words to her. Hollering at her as if her body having holes they can fill for a price gives them a right to her feelings and soul. It is the third time that year and the five hundred and sixty-seventh time in her short life that some stinking man has screamed at her, you have no heart. And something clangs within her.

She begins to fight her way down. 

It is not so hard - especially now that there is a war. War takes its toll on all the bodies it bears near. She follows along in a line of sex workers, nurses, slaves, poets, and orphans who have no where else to go. War can provide the right kind of person glory and status, if they work for it - if they’re willing to kill for it. She has no designs on the bodies, she just wants to go _down_. The forgotten followers of war whisper stories from when they were children, of a world where the chrome and metal and dust and cold is a distant memory,

When she is twenty-two, they tell her that she is four stories up from where she was born. She seethes with rage at this war that took her up instead of down. Occasionally, they pass windows, and something in her chest aches. She knows it isn’t her heart - she is now heartless one thousand and thirty-two times over. War makes monsters out of everyone, and all monsters seem to want is a heart to crunch down on with their sharp teeth. Makes it easier to spot - having no heart - if everyone is looking for more to destroy. When she is twenty-three, they tell her that she is closer to the Sky than she has ever been and something in her bones tells her to run. She’s not ready for the Sky. A body can only handle so many monsters, and she’s quite comfortable with the ones she knows thank you very much. 

When she is twenty-three, a man with a crooked face and crooked legs and no heart at all, looks at her and tells her that she has the most beautiful heart he’s ever seen. And she stays with him. Because he’s from Below. He tells her of wild people who live on stories where the windows are open always - the wind and dirt of the outside flying through and warming them and chilling them and bringing demons and dragons and dangers. He says they live in mountains of sand and sun brought inside by thousands of reflective mirrors. She doesn’t ask what the sun is, she knows enough not to expose her ignorance. He tells her of the Seven, who saw the waters rising and built a tower to bring them closer to the sky so that they might be safe from wars and pestilence and the salty oceans. He tells her of the people that came after, that built upon that and built upon that until there was nowhere left to go. She asks what is at the end, and he says nothing, but she thinks it might be what they are fighting a war for. A war for whatever comes after the building stops. He tells her the wind is too strong above King’s Landing for there to be any exposure to the outside, that the whole Seven & Seven will tip to one side like Piza. She thinks he means pizza and doesn’t correct him. He tells her of corporations and kingdoms and she does not tell him that the differences between the two are only in the way the story is told. He tells her of the stories below the water - of the dark, dreamy people who love loudly and have built a world of only windows so that they might always see the chaos that man can wrought. She doesn’t point to the dying outside his tent, because she’s not sure he understands the irony. Somewhere, in between all the tellings and all the moments when he pressed his lips to her chest and whispered to a heart she stopped believing in long ago, they begin their descent.

When she is twenty-five, she watches her crooked man marry a child and wonders if, now, he will take her to the Balcony he promised her.

*

Sansa gives her small, strange husband an embroidered tunic as a wedding gift. She does not tell him that she has been making it for Rickon, still holding onto hope that her youngest brother is still alive Above. Her unshed tears make up over half of the garment and she hopes, with all her dried out heart, that the damn thing is cursed. 

Tyrion is embarrassed, because he did not think to bring his child-bride a gift. 

“What do you desire most of all?” he asks, and then blushes with chagrin. 

His child-bride raises a single eyebrow and he knows, horribly, that she is not as dry as his sister believes, she is not yet broken. His heart thumps irregularly at the horror and cosmic beauty of it. This beautiful girl, sitting right under the Queen’s nose, boiling over with passion and rage and the wherewithal to hide it from everyone. 

He hopes that she will ask for his nephew’s head on a platter. 

He thinks for a moment that he might give it to her, regardless. 

“The Sky,” she says simply. 

And he thinks - in another life - he could have fallen in love with this strong, silent, beautiful princess.

*

The Balcony is already occupied by the time her crooked man ushers her through the thick door; a thin, tall girl wrapped in a too-thin shawl and with her dark auburn hair flying around her head wildly is leaning as far out as she can and Shae’s heart jumps in her chest.

“Your _wife_?” she hisses disdainfully. 

Tyrion kisses her on the cheek quickly and then turns away, “I am needed at the Small Council, take care of our girl.” This last, he tosses over his shoulder just as the princess turns back to see. 

“Are you my girl or am I yours?” Sansa asks cheekily, her face raised to the sky, her loose hair trailing at her waist now that she has pulled herself back into the safety of the private, enclosed Balcony.

Shae only sniffs derisively in response, the sound swallowed up by the wind. Her heart thumps wildly again, and she presses the heel of her left palm into her breastbone to find the pain and make it stop. 

_You have no heart,_ she whispers deep inside, where no one can hear. 

When she looks back up, the young princess is looking at her quizzically.

“It’s your first time.”

Shae rubs her chest harder. 

“You wanted to be alone.”

A single tear tracks down her face. 

*

When she was twenty-one, Sansa Stark put the Queen’s head on a spike and smiled as the cruel prince screamed in anger and agony. 

When she was twenty-six, Shae Stark dragged a knife across the throat of a cruel prince and wiggled her bare toes in the puddle that formed beneath his body as he bled out slowly and painfully.

When she was twenty-four, Margaery Tyrell took the crown from the blood-soaked hand of the Queen in the North and placed it triumphantly on her own head. 

When she was seventeen, Arya Stark knelt in allegiance to the new Queens and began a decades-long assassination campaign up and down the Seven & Seven, single-handedly putting an end to anyone disloyal to her Queens.

When she was twenty-nine, Daenerys Targaryen rode her dragon out a bay window and into the open air and named herself Queen of all she found there. 

*

Six months after Circe’s death and Margaery’s coronation, Sansa and Shae were fully settled into Winterfell and had made their trek North - to find Jon Snow and Bran Stark where the building ends. At the final landing, Jon raised his large, wool-covered hand to the door and Sansa stopped him by placing a single finger on his shoulder. 

“My love,” Sansa intoned - in that queenly way that made Shae’s heart pound in public and her toes curl in private. “My love, will go first.”

A murmur of voices - tales of demons and ghosts and dragons and all sorts of horrors - rippled through the crowd of men that had accompanied them here, to the end of the world. To the final Wall between Shae and the Sky. 

Jon merely bowed his head to his queen, and ushered Shae forward. 

The door creaked on dry, rusted hinges. The rush of icy wind struck her cheeks and she closed her eyes against the bitterness of it, relishing the taste of metallic cold on her chapped lips. 

At twenty-six and eight months, Shae - Queen Consort in the North - stepped over the threshold of the Final Door and out into the outside. Where there were no walls and no corridors and nothing keeping her from flying or falling or both.

Shae breathed deep and began to shake with sobs. Would have fallen to the ice-encrusted ground if her beautiful wife had not been there to catch her, hold her close to her warmth, and raise their faces - cheek to cheek - to the sky. 

Sansa gasped in the same moment that Jon and the rest of their company saw what she was seeing. 

A chorus rose up behind them and the Queens in the North were swept away on it. Shae’s heart began to beat and for the first time in her life, she felt alive. Sansa felt a pool of warmth between her thighs and felt as fertile and wet and full as a young girl during her first menses.

 _Spring is coming,_ they shouted. _Spring is coming._

*

When she was twelve, they told her she would be a Queen and this would protect her people.

When she was seven, they told her that love hurt and that this would keep her whole.

It takes an empty Queen to welcome in the Spring.  
It takes a broken Queen to rebuild the world.  
(That’s what the legends say.)  
(Maybe they just got lucky.)


End file.
